# Tutorial on survival modeling with applications to omics data

## TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive workflow and tutorial for applying survival analysis techniques, especially Cox-type penalized regressions and Bayesian models, to high-dimensional omics data for identifying prognostic markers.

## Contribution

It introduces a general, practical workflow and R tutorial for survival analysis with high-dimensional omics data, focusing on feature selection and model validation.

## Key findings

- Effective application of Cox-type penalized regressions for high-dimensional data
- Hierarchical Bayesian models improve feature selection in survival analysis
- Tutorial implementation using TCGA omics data demonstrates practical utility

## Abstract

Motivation: Identification of genomic, molecular and clinical markers prognostic of patient survival is important for developing personalized disease prevention, diagnostic and treatment approaches. Modern omics technologies have made it possible to investigate the prognostic impact of markers at multiple molecular levels, including genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, and how these potential risk factors complement clinical characterization of patient outcomes for survival prognosis. However, the massive sizes of the omics data sets, along with their correlation structures, pose challenges for studying relationships between the molecular information and patients' survival outcomes. Results: We present a general workflow for survival analysis that is applicable to high-dimensional omics data as inputs when identifying survival-associated features and validating survival models. In particular, we focus on the commonly used Cox-type penalized regressions and hierarchical Bayesian models for feature selection in survival analysis, which are are especially useful for high-dimensional data, but the framework is applicable more generally. Availability and implementation: A step-by-step R tutorial using The Cancer Genome Atlas survival and omics data for the execution and evaluation of survival models has been made available at https://ocbe-uio.github.io/survomics/survomics.html.